Iain Banks has written startlingly dark, intelligent novels – most notably The Wasp Factory – but tells the world that the new one will be the last. He announces his coming death with characteristic humour but without darkness, only frank resignation: “I am officially Very Poorly.”

He has gall bladder cancer and counts his remaining life in months. He asked his partner, Adele Hartley, “to do me the honour of becoming my widow”, apologising for the “ghoulish humour”. All public appearances are cancelled in favour of seeing friends and relatives. He has gone on honeymoon and reports via a friend that he is in Italy “enjoying life to the max”.

There is an admirable breezy gallantry and good example about the way in which public people have begun to take back ownership of their own mortality, kicking away the cobwebs of terror and denial and dispelling the sickly, deceptive miasma of false hope. It is not the same as ''giving up” or refusing to “fight” (terminal cancer patients get really sick of that language, with its implication that if they were a bit more positive they’d get better). There is a time to fight and hope for life, but when modern medicine, despite its bias in favour of prolonging life at all costs, admits that it can do no more, acceptance is healthy. Use the time, smell the roses, speak your love.

Dennis Potter said, when he was dying, that looking at spring outside the window had become marvellous. “The whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it… the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous, the glory of it, the comfort of it, the reassurance… The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy do you see it! And boy can you celebrate it.”

More recently, Terry Pratchett confronted his illness with a riveting, troubling exploration of the Dignitas assisted suicide clinic, in which he publicly considered whether he would want to take that route rather than decline into helplessness. He came to no conclusion, but examined medical research into the illness with the words: “I’m going to make Alzheimer’s sorry it got ME!”

He does not pretend that any day now he will be cured, however. He is grown-up enough to know better, and to know, as Iain Banks does, that death has made an appointment. Accepting this, in the long or the short term, is the ultimate test of adulthood: when Damien Hirst titled his pickled shark, The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living, he revealed nothing but his own callow youth.

Down the ages, wise men have looked on skulls and coffins and come to a peaceful, if unwilling, acceptance that we’ll all be dust one day. And that it could be soon. Soldiers going into battle know it, firefighters know it, Captain Oates knew it when he went out into the Antarctic wastes (“I may be some time”). In 1535 Thomas More wrote to his daughter, the night before his execution, “Pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven.” Religion helps but is not essential: even people of faith know in their bones that we don’t really know anything at all about what lies beyond death. Can’t know. And that if we did know, there would be no point in anything.

So it is good, oddly heartening, when eloquent writers express their acceptance of the end. There have been “cancer diaries” by journalists such as John Diamond, Ruth Picardie and Martyn Harris, offering a kind of fellowship through the debilitating, weary trail of treatment; to those who are not under sentence, or not yet, they offer reassurance that even when you are dying (perhaps especially then) you are still yourself: combative, jokey, ironic, sometimes cowardly and sometimes brave. And that being realistic about it is not defeatist.

But accepting death, whether it comes soon or late, does not have to involve sickbed detail, any more than it has to be morbid or suicidal. It’s just a fact, and in an age of delusion and comfortable fantasy, accepting facts does us nothing but good. I have loved three people during the year they knew their death was coming, one of them only in his thirties. And the lines that seem to echo are those Maurice Baring wrote for Julian Grenfell, in the First World War:

Because of you we will be glad and gay

Remembering you, we will be brave and strong

To hail the advent of each dangerous day

And meet the last adventure with a song.

Denise Welch’s not alone in wasting her talent

The other night I saw Denise Welch deliver a brilliantly funny performance in Richard Bean’s scabrous comedy Smack Family Robinson, and felt almost aggrieved that with this joyful talent for live theatre, she has become better known for Loose Women, Celebrity Big Brother and a rather boring affair-with-Kevin plot in Coronation Street. It reminded me of Sir Nicholas Hytner’s brisk remark that he hauled James Corden back onstage for One Man, Two Guvnors because he “thought he was wasting his time on quiz shows”.

Of course, the economics of a performer’s life mean that you need a bit of telly, however rubbishy, just to earn a decent living. Fair enough. But this fleeting feeling reminded me of how often it happens in ordinary life, too.

A schoolchild who is brilliant on the violin, soaring through the grades and playing with profound feeling, suddenly decides that professional musicians’ lives are too hard, gets a job as an accountant and never plays again, even for fun. The gifted artist marries, takes a solid job designing crisp packets, and lives in a flat with no room for an easel. A young woman leaves the corps de ballet to have babies, and never comes back. And the rest of us, quite unreasonably, feel a bit cheated. So little talent in the world, such a shame to waste it.

If it’s too cheap, ask yourself why

Globalisation brings us the world’s goods with apparent ease. We wander down the high street with a beaker of coffee grown thousands of miles away, to buy yet another impossibly cheap fashion item or i-Thing, and prefer not to think too much about how weirdly privileged, in the context of human history, we are. So it is disturbing to read allegations about the way our stuff is produced in distant and poorer lands.

The Zara chain is the latest to be accused of exploiting virtually slave labour: the workers’ rights group La Alameda, in Argentina, accuses the label of sourcing garments made by immigrants – mainly illegal, Bolivian and including children – working in “degrading” conditions for 13 hours a day, unable to leave the workplace and living near their machines. Zara denies using such factories and is investigating: its record hitherto seemed clean.

But we shoppers should not let our slightly straitened circumstances blind us to the fact that if something is improbably cheap – laptop, dress, trainers, whatever – somebody very poor indeed (and maybe very young) probably made it. And yes, in many societies that person will indeed have been glad of the work. But that shouldn’t let us off the hook: certain basic decencies are not negotiable.We should follow up accusations, read the reports, let the retailers know that we care. And care, too, about the low-paid, often insecure crews on huge ships that bring us these riches. Not a picnic for them, either: ask the Mission to Seafarers.